Don't You Climb Down Darling
by plumbobjo
Summary: Brendan says Dublin is their oyster; Ste think it's more than that - it's a place for them to rediscover each other. Five times Ste and Brendan have sex in Dublin.


Notes: Five times fic. All Dublin, baby. It's quite porny with some angst (my default apparently). Title from Towers by Bon Iver.

Warnings: Allusions to child abuse.

Word Count ~2800

* * *

**1.**

It's over too quickly.

Brendan's on him blindly in the dark the second they get through the hotel room door.

He pins Ste to the wood and devours, pushes up until there's not a breath of space between them. He's hard in a matter of seconds, they both are. Hard and hungry and desperate. Ste's shaking so badly he can hardly stand and Brendan has to take over completely, has to unbutton his coat and undo his jeans for him, because he can't do a damn thing except whimper and say Brendan's name like it's part of every word group.

It's the first time in too long and Ste had forgotten how huge Brendan's hands were. He comes all over long, talented fingers with a shudder that nearly breaks him apart and Brendan follows him shortly after, his own hand wrapped around Ste's weak and lagging one, urging him on until he buries his face in Ste's neck and sighs his name.

The whole thing lasts about three minutes and Ste breathes a laugh which quickly turns into a full on guffaw. Brendan's face splits into a blinding smile through the darkness like he can't help it and then he's right there with him like it's the funniest thing in the whole damn world.

**2.**

They sit and drink whiskey and talk.

The room lights glow like warm honey and Brendan's eyes flutter as he speaks. He's sweet and halting and when he leans across the gap to where Ste's knelt on the bed his touch is careful and tentative.

He strips Ste's t-shirt off in a slow pull and the cold hits him. He has the weirdest urge to cover himself up and hide away. The way Brendan looks at him like he's something shiny and new is intensely exposing and he curls up against the scrutiny, defenses climbing into place.

"Hey," Brendan says softly and Ste catalogs the differences between his old Brendan and this one. He's safer with this one but right now he doesn't feel it. There's too much knowledge and expectation and trust and his heart thumps with tortured nerves. There's nothing to hide behind anymore. Without the games he doesn't know who they really are or how they fit together.

Brendan's hand touches his face and he feels the fine tremble flow into his skin. He looks up into Brendan's face and sees the awe and uncertainty in his eyes. He chews on his bottom lip and Ste watches in fascination and feels himself open up like a sun-seeking plant. He inches forwards and Brendan takes his wrists and pulls until he's straddling his lap.

The touch on his back is unfamiliar, slow and reverent.

The hair between his fingers is different, dark and spikey.

Brendan kisses him with his eyes open, looks up through his lashes when he drags his lips down Ste's jaw and into the dip of his throat. He tips his head and feels the soft, damp slide across his pulse, the warm and tingling press across his bare shoulder and the top of his arm. Ste turns his face into Brendan's and rubs his nose along his cheek and they rock together slowly, a rhythmic give and take like the inhale/exhale of air.

Brendan wraps him up tightly and rolls him onto his back, makes up a place between Ste's spread thighs. He peels off the rest of Ste's clothes and maps his skin with his lips. The soft inside his elbow is responsive and hasn't been touched in a long time. When Brendan brushes his ankle with his fingertips he tenses up and Brendan stops. It's too much of someone else's gesture and it's still raw enough to hurt.

Ste slides a leg over Brendan's body and climbs back into his lap. He grinds his hips down against denim and kisses Brendan into the mattress, spreads his fingers across Brendan's chest and scrapes his nails lightly through hair until he shivers and breaks out in goosebumps all over, relearns every response like he's reading a dusty, well-worn book. He takes down Brendan's zip with his teeth and nuzzles his dick, kisses sloppy up the length of him, bites on the soft inside of his thigh until his leg jumps. He strips layers away and gazes up and sees nothing but _Brendan_.

He lays on his stomach, propped up on his elbows, and Brendan licks him open, flat strokes of his tongue against his hole and wet suction with his lips against fragile nerve endings until he's helplessly pushing into the mattress, his heavy head hanging down as he gasps out what vaguely passes for breathing. Brendan slides spit-slick fingers inside him, rubs slow and precise like he's playing a finely tuned instrument, and Ste moans and sighs and talks, _there _and _harder _and _too hard _until it's like there was never a time when they weren't doing this.

When Brendan pushes into him he's on his back and they're right there, stripped bare and face to face. There's nothing to hide behind and it's okay. When Brendan gazes intently down at him his blood runs hot and itchy but he doesn't shy away from the pressure.

They face each other head on and bring the walls down together.

**3.**

He's sweat-slick and Brendan shines in the pale, night-morning light from the window.

The skin on the inside of Ste's thighs is sore with friction, the muscles in his legs aching with tension. He sits astride Brendan's hips with the length of his dick pushed up inside him and their fingers tangled together, the strength of Brendan's arms giving him a solid weight to pull against as he rolls his hips.

Brendan's eyes flick over the inches of his body and he's never felt more on display. He tips his head back, sucks on his bottom lip, moans and gasps whenever he angles it just right, and gives Brendan something to look at. He goes slow and languid, long stretches of melting heat and air thick and heavy with sex smell and Brendan tells him he's beautiful and _what did he do to deserve this, shouldn't even be here, _and Ste tell Brendan he _loves him_, will never stop loving him, fucking hot and perfect and safe, so safe, until they're both delirious and close and shaking. Brendan's hands flex in his grasp and Ste senses he wants to touch and lets him go and thrills in the instant cling and stroke of rough, spreading palms across his sides and back and stomach.

"Steven," he gasps, a hitching, choked-off sound and Ste nods and doesn't relent, just leans and braces his hands against Brendan's chest and pumps up and down hard, grinds his hips down as close as his weight will press him to take in more and make it so good. "Jesus - I'm gonna come."

The words catch him low and like a sucker-punch and he gasps out, "for me, Brendan - come on," and Brendan arches his spine and throws back his head and cries out, long and low and broken. Ste rides him through it and can't take his eyes away because he's beautiful and painfully vulnerable and all _his_, every last inch. Every flaw and perfection and memory and experience. Brendan's mere existence is Ste's to watch over now and it's fragile at best.

When Brendan grips a tight fist around his dick and strokes him, rough and sudden, he comes in stripes all across Brendan's body and breathlessly calls him a dirty, cheating bastard.

"What?" he asks innocently in a little-boy voice and Ste smears sticky white into his chest hair and says _errr, try get that out then. _Brendan calls him a disgusting little article and Ste tells him next time he can eat it.

He ends up with Brendan sucking his fingers dry as he stares and gasps and his dick tries its best to get hard again.

**4.**

Brendan's pale and cold-flushed from the brisk winter sunlight.

" - whatever the pleasure," he drawls and they kiss and Brendan is a huge and solid force to be reckoned with above him.

Today is the day where Brendan takes care of Ste, where he sets himself up as the man that he intends to be from this moment on. Last night was about learning and remembering but today is all about fetching coffee and laying foundations.

Ste's capacity for pleasure right now feels limitless and there's a million things he wants to ask for but he needn't rush; there's time for a million things. He's only in Ireland for a few more hours and he wants to get cultured.

"Guinness."

"Guinness?" Brendan looks at him like Ste's just asked him to do a tap dance around the hotel room.

"I've never tried it before."

"Twenty-two years old and you've never had Guinness?"

"Shocking, innit?" Ste asks dryly. "Anyway, if you're gonna try Guinness for the first time, where's better?"

Brendan considers him and shrugs one shoulder and says, "yeah, okay." He tries to pull away but Ste curls one hand around the back of his neck and pulls him back in.

"'Ang on, thought of summat else I want."

"Is it somethin' else that doesn't involve you writhing about on the bedsheets?"

The words shoot like an injection of liquid heat through his veins and straight to his dick. "I was only gonna ask for a kiss."

"Awww, sweet," Brendan croons, low and rumbly, and ducks for his mouth. Ste puts up a finger to stop him.

"Not there."

"Ah - not so sweet, hmm?" Christ the things Brendan's voice does to him pitched all low like that. "Let's go take a shower. You smell like penis."

Brendan falls to his knees under the shower spray and nuzzles against Ste's hip, bites at the stretch of skin covering bone and sucks his mark there, licks him from base to tip and takes his damn time. Ste leans forward, hands braced on the wall tiles at Brendan's back with his head hanging forward and moans encouragement.

Their eyes meet, Brendan gazing up at him all feverish and glistening and _hard _and there's a palm spread on his lower back urging him to move his hips so he does. He crowds closer, traps Brendan with his body, nowhere to go with the solid tiles at his back, and fucks his soft, wet mouth. Brendan touches his hips lightly but doesn't try to control his movement, doesn't try to push or stop him, just takes everything Ste gives him like he fucking _loves _it.

He cries out, knees shaking, and comes in Brendan's mouth to relentless, laving suction.

"Nothing to clean up this time," Brendan jokes when Ste can hear again and he shakily mutters something about Brendan's new diet in return which makes them both crack up.

He pushes Brendan against the wall and takes his hard dick into a fist and kisses across his shoulders and collarbone, his throat and the dip of soft skin underneath where water gathers mixed salty with sweat. He presses the flat of his tongue softly over a nipple and sucks it gently into his mouth, breathes over the puckered skin until he feels a full body shiver go through him. He worships Brendan's body because it's fucking amazing and he'll never get over how much skin and muscle and space there is for him to kiss and claim and own.

Brendan comes over Ste's fist and stomach and he supposes he's owed that.

He's feeling loose and a bit soppy and he takes a sponge and soaps it up and drags it across Brendan's chest and stomach and does a running commentary like he would if he was with his kids in the bath. Brendan laughs and tries to slap him away but gives up with an exaggerated eye-roll and a mumbled _you're so weird. _

**5.**

Brendan stands in washed-out grey light that twinkles on scattering dust motes but he's not _Brendan _anymore.

He's Seamus now, trapped in that clutching, suffocating mire of dark fog and sucking, yawning gravity. He's stretched infinite on the very horizon of that black hole, pressure so thick and massive in the room that Ste can feel its pull himself, and Ste can't let him fall in.

His voice doesn't shake when he says, "doesn't matter anymore, though. Does it?" but when Brendan looks at him, lost and wide-eyed and desperate like a little boy begging for _something _to make it all better he feels his breath hitch and catch and time slows and the world holds its breath for _them_. Everything hinges on this moment and Ste doesn't do cliche and sentimental, words aren't going to be enough because he _knows _words and all they do is ring out hollow and meaningless.

Instead, he claps his hands in dust and grips and hurls and shatters glass and watches Brendan come back to him bit by bit. When he smiles at Ste, he sees everything that Brendan had fought with to keep them apart and watches it dissolve into certainty. He picks up a stool and looks at Ste for something, approval maybe, direction, and Ste nods, encourages, and watches as Brendan turns his impulse for destruction outwards for the first time.

Together, they destroy the old and crumbling foundations of what created the monster that Brendan fights with constantly and they kiss amongst its wreckage like survivors of some natural disaster until Brendan's wrestled him out of half of his clothes and swept him up off his feet and onto the brass banister of the bar.

Brendan holds him there with his hands and body a solid thing to cling to between his legs and fucks him rough and punishing, adrenaline singing through both their veins so strong that Ste can _taste _it in the air and against Brendan's skin when he sucks on the hammering pulse in his throat like he's trying to suck the life-blood right out of him. He locks his ankles around Brendan's back and grips his broad shoulders for dear life whilst Brendan shows him how much of a man he really is.

They come together, Brendan makes sure of it, and Ste kisses him through it, just a messy clash of lips and teeth and tongue to prove how _here _he is, how he'll always be here, not going anywhere, never, and Brendan drinks him in like Ste's filling him up where he's squeezed hollow and empty. When the Earth stops trembling they breathe into the tiny space between them, shaky and ragged, and Ste _loves _so strongly and with everything in him that he feels invincible. His whole body yearns and reaches out to Brendan and even though their close, just fucked, even, he wants to get closer and further and _more. _

" - love you - I love you, thank you - I love you, Steven - " Brendan stutters through heaving breath, desperate words that say so much but still don't even come close to describing how Ste feels. If someone told him to die for Brendan right this moment he would and he'd do it gladly.

"I love you, too," he says just as wrecked and he kisses Brendan again, his lips and cheeks and eyelashes and nose, presses his lips and face into Brendan's skin and breathes him in and tries to _show _Brendan how much he means, how much he's worth, through his touch.

The moment stretches and he feels himself calm down from the insane high they just climbed to. He feels like he just took something and it's finally draining out of his system. High on love and all that soppy shit. He thinks it but he doesn't say it, he might be half mad from Brendan but he's not an idiot.

They collapse to the dusty floor and get Ste back into his clothes and it's fucking hilarious, Ste on his back whilst Brendan helps him get his pants on and he's laughing hysterically and really just making it more difficult until Brendan sits on him and pins him in place with breath-stealing kisses.

They sit facing one another, Brendan's leg leaning against his casually, always touching now, and the silence is like restoration in this dusty old place. He can feel the slow pulling together of broken things, Brendan salvaging what's left from this ruin, tucking it away and leaving the rest to rot. He's calm and thoughtful and he's _Brendan, _through and though.

"Hey," he says softly and Ste looks. "Time to go home."

Time to go home, time to forget and rebuild, _our time_, time for you and me.

Ste nods and takes Brendan's hand. They brush the dust off their clothes and just like that - it breaks away.


End file.
